Browse Recent Book Reviews

The National Treasure system, instituted in Japan in the late nineteenth century, has had a strong influence in the establishment of the canon of Japanese art history. A work or a monument may be designated as a National Treasure or Important Cultural Property after a team of specialists presents a detailed study evaluating its historical and artistic importance. In most cases, the conclusions of these specialists formed the basis for the standard account in Japanese art history. The subject of Sherry Fowler’ book Murōji: Rearranging Art and History at a Japanese Buddhist Temple is a famous Buddhist temple established in… Full Review

In Stephen Bann’s account of the complex professional nexus that produced images and reputations in nineteenth-century France, prints finally get their due. The important role of reproductive engraving in the rich visual culture before 1900 has been marginalized for years, but as Bann asserts, printmaking—in the sense of fine engravings made after contemporary paintings—was “an integral part of the academic system of nineteenth-century French visual art” (vi). He looks at the use that painters made of traditional engraving, the newer process of lithography, and, ultimately, photography, within the larger context of contemporary artistic practice. In laying out an overarching theme… Full Review

This fascinating book explores Charles Longfellow’s travels in Japan from 1871–73 and his return, laden with curios, photos, and tattoos, to the Boston home of his illustrious father, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It also marks a milestone in author Christine Guth’s own impressive journey from the kind of “traditional connoisseurial concerns” emphasized during her graduate training to the complex and compelling world of “visual cultural studies” (xii). Over the last decade or so the experience of Americans in Meiji-era Japan has been much examined in popular books like Christopher Benfey’s lively The Great Wave (New York: Random House, 2003)… Full Review

Did modern architecture ever die? Accounts of its demise appear much exaggerated, especially to a new generation, for whom postmodern historicism seems the exclusive domain of strip malls and willful eccentrics with enough money to pay for correct Corinthian detailing, whatever that is. Most of this younger generation of star architects, and there are plenty of them, owe their fame in no small part to deliberate distance they have put between themselves and any but the most casual recall of history. Abstract form and technological imagery are very much back in vogue Meredith Clausen’s The Pan Am Building and the… Full Review

The title of this stimulating collection of essays points to one of its important contributions. The very structure of Saints, Sinners, and Sisters rejects the bipolar evaluation of women that has been so pervasive in Western culture. While two sections of the book are devoted to consideration of women as either “Saints” or “Sinners,” the third section is concerned with “Sisters, Wives, Poets.” The whole collection reminds us of the multiplicity of roles that women played in medieval and early modern Europe, even as they do today. The editors, Jane Carroll and Alison Stewart, have selected essays that demonstrate how… Full Review

Some things never go out of style. One of those is Parthenon scholarship; a year does not pass without the appearance of books and articles devoted to this most venerable of Greek monuments. One would think that there are no more questions to be asked, no more answers to be proposed, but this is decidedly not the case. The Acropolis restoration project alone, active since the 1970s and spearheaded by Manolis Korres, constantly brings new information to light, to say nothing of new methodologies and technologies that inspire one to look at the familiar in new ways. … Full Review

France’s defeat by Prussia in 1870, closely followed by an agonizing civil insurrection, led to the christening of that period as the country’s année terrible. While 1870–71 marks a crisp line for historians between the Second Empire and the Third Republic, the events of the Prussian siege of Paris from September 1870 to January 1871 have not been interrogated for their art-historical significance. Hollis Clayson’s groundbreaking work, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870–1871), provides just such an interrogation. Clayson seeks to complicate social art histories that read artists only as “exemplars of a collectivity… Full Review

The intersection of space and place occurs on shifting sands at the borders of philosophy and aesthetics. This is not to suggest a lack of clarity about either way of knowing, but to make a claim about the fuzziness of the epistemological boundaries that the debate about space and place must necessarily engage. Edward Casey’s book Representing Place situates itself within the din of geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, architects, and philosophers rallying under the postmodern banner of place over space. For some time now his work has entered the fray. This, the third in a trilogy of books that includes Getting… Full Review

The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the same name, which was on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal from October 2004 to September 2005. The catalogue presents a new study of a significant period of change in a major North American city. Like other CCA catalogues, it is a carefully produced book with high-quality illustrations. It includes a fascinating collection of visual material, and the essays are valuable contributions to the literature on architecture and urban planning in the 1960s, as well as to scholarship on Montreal. The project focuses… Full Review

This deluxe two-volume boxed set is a catalogue raisonné documenting Ilya Kabakov’s important and influential work as an installation artist. Yet in keeping with the current practice of institutional critique, which turns every corner of the institution of art into an exhibition space in order to make those corners visible in a new way, it is much more. Included are descriptions of 155 installations executed between 1983 and 2000, along with preparatory drawings, installation photographs, and information about the exhibitions in which they appeared and the museums that own them. The bulk of the book consists of extensive commentaries by… Full Review